Here’s the honest truth about VoIP and power outages: when the power goes out, your VoIP phone goes down. Your router needs electricity, your phone needs electricity, and unlike an old copper landline that drew power from the phone company’s central office, VoIP doesn’t have that trick up its sleeve.

But here’s the rest of the truth: with a little planning, you can keep your phone system running through most outages, and gracefully handle the ones you can’t.

Let’s address the elephant in the room — or, more accurately, the dropped call in the pasture. If you live in a rural area, you’ve earned a healthy skepticism about technology promises. “It works great!” usually comes with an asterisk: in ideal conditions, in metropolitan areas, with fiber internet.

So let’s have an honest conversation about VoIP reliability in the real world, where internet connections vary and the nearest cell tower might be a suggestion rather than a guarantee.